The filmmaker needs to be one of three things (as a very dear friend opined a few days back) he should either be able to – make an ordinary concept great; make a great concept simple; or make an extravagant concept even larger. I had thought then, albeit quietly, that there is one more form of filmmaker, one who pulls at your heartstrings more often than the other three. This fourth variety of filmmaker is an unobtrusive observer, he spends his time watching commonplace objects and situations, he sees stories where the rest of us say none exists and he tells us a story, often with no immediate foreseeable end or conclusion. Satyajit Ray belonged to that category. More recently, Dibakar Banerjee earned his way into the club. And now, Shoojit Sircar has proved his credentials with “Piku” – a story of an impassioned, short tempered Bengali girl residing in Delhi with a septuagenarian father obsessed with his bowels.
“The raw material for cinema is life itself. The filmmaker has to keep his eyes and ears open, let him do so.” The formidable intellect of the great Satyajit Ray could not have been closer to the point. A screenwriter in Hollywood, when faced with the dilemma of complying with his director’s wish – that of making the script larger than life, failing which, the audience would not accept it, replied, “…But you’ve got to realise people don’t go to the movies to escape life, they go to rediscover it!”
We did not see Anupam Kher in Khosla ka Ghosla, we watched the struggles of an about to retire salaried old Delhi resident vying for a place in South Delhi and finding himself at war with a potbellied builder. In Piku, we do not see Amitabh Bachchan, nor do we watch Deepika Padukone on screen; we watch high decibel scenes between a scrappy, ill-tempered daughter squabbling with a father who expresses “emotion through motion”. There is a refreshing lack of destination and a focus on a long, rambling journey. Constipation is funny, and it remains so. People have sex for fun, and it remains so. People have impossible parents who they love but lose hair on whose account, and it remains so. It’s life on screen, and the Hrishikesh Mukherjee-esque plotline and storytelling melts your heart and moistens your eye. Why does Piku work? Because it makes no apology, and makes us fools complaining about monotony about the extraordinariness of our “mundane” lives.
The film isn’t perfect – some may argue against the slight dip in pace during the drawn out road trip; one may find the premise for Irrfan Khan’s sudden self assignation to the seemingly insurmountable task of ferrying the daughter-father duo halfway across the country a little unconvincing. But it would be a sin of no small order to criticise a film which dazzles with a lack of dance and glamour. And a complete lack of dialogue delivery – the actors speak in robust common tones – brings a sense of realism to the film which would have made the old masters proud. Credits of course must be give to the entire cast, which accounts for about seventy percent of this movie’s success. A simple story needs strong storytellers to keep it riveting, and the trio of Amitabh, Irrfan and Deepika keep it tight. Bhaskor Banerji is infuriating and endearing, Rana Chaudhari is affable and funny, but Piku Banerji is simply spectacular. It is easy to fade away when in the same frame as Bachchan or Khan, but she managed not only to hold her own, but shine with a bright, yet pleasing light. I am a Bengali, and being so, I am (As Bhaskor puts it) a “critical” person. But, to her credit, the Bangalorean in Deepika disappears completely and we see the epitome of that-Bong-girl-you’d-be-mad-to-piss-off. Of course, this would not be possible if not for Shoojit Sircar’s direction. He has shown immense love for the characters, and a firm belief in the story progress. He has treated the characters as celebrities and not the actors. And the mvie has come alive as refreshingly as Kolkata on a rain drenched March evening.
You watched and loved the Khoslas. It’s time to fall in love with the Banerjis.
drunkeninkpot 